OUTDOOR EDUCATION
It’s after dark in Torea Bay. We are relaxing on the lawn outside Outward Bound’s Te Kainga cottage, where we are staying overnight. Or not, as it turns out.
“Tonight, you will sleep on the cutter,” says instructor Kate Gloeggler. “First, you will need to row it out to the buoy. We will give you sleeping bags. You will need to be back at the jetty and dressed ready for physical training at 6.20am.”
Our little group processes this bombshell. We’d assumed we’d be sleeping in the cottage. Our PT gear is still in our luggage. We are Sheppard Watch, Course 699, on the first of an eightday Discovery course and our first discovery is that Gloeggler is good at dropping bombshells.
We later learn that she’s just warming up. Gloeggler and co-instructor Stephen Kuni’s ‘surprises’ are key to the mantra that underpins everything about Outward Bound: plus est en vous (there is more in you). It was a favourite mantra of Kurt Hahn’s, the school’s founder, and reminds us that no matter how great the hardship, how tired we think we are, we can do more.
But I knew this, from 1975. Why am I even here again? Blame the mid-winter blues. I needed a challenge. A kick. And as a writer, Outward Bound’s 60th anniversary was a good story. So came the brainwave: why not do another course,
